Exponential Private Market Growth Became Economically Important At A National Level

For most of modern history, private markets served primarily as a transitional stage. Companies raised capital, grew their businesses, and eventually entered public markets, where investors gained access to mature firms and employees gained liquidity for their ownership stakes.

Today, that relationship has changed. Private markets are no longer a waiting room before an IPO. They have become a major destination for capital, company-building, and wealth creation in their own right.

Globally, there are now more than 1,300 unicorn companies—private businesses valued at more than $1 billion—with a combined valuation exceeding $6.4 trillion. Since 2012, private capital has more than doubled to approximately $22 trillion. In 2024 alone, U.S. private companies raised roughly $840 billion, representing more than a third of all capital raised by U.S. businesses. Since 2000, the number of publicly listed U.S. companies has fallen by half, to just over 4,000, while the number of venture-backed private companies has increased dramatically.

This shift is not simply about company age, but company maturity. Research from IPO scholar Jay Ritter shows that companies reaching public markets today are substantially more mature than previous generations. The median age of companies going public is now roughly 14 years. In 1980, the median IPO company reported inflation-adjusted revenue of approximately $64 million. By 2024, that figure had climbed to roughly $218 million. Much of the growth that once occurred after an IPO is now happening before one.

Consider a few examples. SpaceX, founded in 2002, has remained private for more than two decades while growing into one of the most important aerospace companies in the world. Stripe, founded in 2010, powers a significant portion of internet commerce and is valued at roughly $159 billion. Databricks, founded in 2013, employs more than 10,000 people and has reached a valuation exceeding $100 billion. Together, these firms employ tens of thousands of people, many of whom receive a meaningful portion of their compensation through private company equity.

Private placements and other exempt offerings now raise dramatically more money than traditional IPOs. Even the SEC increasingly recognizes “later-stage private companies” as a distinct category of business requiring substantial capital to fund operations at scale.

The question is no longer whether private markets matter. The question is whether the infrastructure surrounding private ownership has evolved quickly enough to support assets of this scale.

But Equivalent Infrastructure Never Arrived

As private markets have grown, the same economic questions that exist in public markets have emerged. What is an asset worth? Who owns it? Can it support borrowing? Public markets developed infrastructure to answer these questions over decades. Private markets often answer them through a combination of contracts, negotiations, and specialized intermediaries.

Private valuations are created through periodic events—funding rounds, tender offers, secondary transactions—rather than continuous markets. Twenty years ago, this was a minor limitation. Today, when private companies are worth hundreds of billions and employees hold enormous stakes, the absence of continuous, standardized price discovery matters considerably more.

Liquidity follows a similar pattern. In public markets, exchanges and market makers ensure a transaction can always occur. A private-company employee looking to sell shares may need to navigate company approval requirements, transfer restrictions, valuation questions, and a much smaller pool of potential buyers—a process that can take weeks or months. Secondary marketplaces and company-sponsored tender offers have emerged to help, but private-market liquidity remains fragmented and event-driven rather than continuous.

The challenges of pricing and liquidity ultimately converge in lending.

When a lender evaluates collateral, the central question is not simply whether an asset is valuable—it’s whether that value can be reliably measured, monitored, and recovered if necessary. Public equities benefit from decades of infrastructure designed to answer those questions, which is why borrowing against public stock has become routine.

Private equity presents a different challenge. The difficulty lies not in evaluating the company itself, but in evaluating the systems surrounding it. Valuations are less standardized, liquidity events are less predictable, and the path from ownership to cash is more complex. Specialized lenders, private banks, and newer platforms have developed ways to provide liquidity against private-company ownership, but these solutions remain far less routine than comparable public-market products. The obstacle is not that private equity lacks value. It is that the infrastructure surrounding ownership, liquidity, and collateralization has not matured at the same pace as the assets themselves.

The Ownership-Liquidity Gap

Behind every private-company valuation are people.

As private markets have grown larger and companies have remained private longer, an increasing number of employees receive meaningful compensation through ownership. In many cases, they are not merely workers—they are shareholders whose long-term financial outcomes are tied to the success of the businesses they help build.

The challenge is that ownership and liquidity are not the same thing. An employee may hold a meaningful stake and still have limited ability to access the value of that ownership. Their salary, professional future, and equity are often concentrated in a single asset, with limited ability to sell or borrow against it. Even when substantial value exists, accessing it requires navigating the same infrastructure limitations described above.

Liquidity creates options. It allows employees to diversify risk, invest in other opportunities, or simply make financial decisions with greater flexibility. In an economy increasingly shaped by private companies—building rockets, advancing artificial intelligence, powering internet commerce—the employees helping create that value find that the financial infrastructure surrounding their ownership hasn’t kept pace. The result is an ownership-liquidity gap: employees increasingly hold valuable assets, but the systems that allow them to access, leverage, or manage those assets have not evolved at the same speed.

Infrastructure Is Emerging

Markets have a tendency to build infrastructure around valuable assets. In the case of public markets, exchanges, custodians, lending products, and settlement systems emerged gradually as public ownership became economically important. Over time, these systems reduced friction, increased confidence, and made entirely new forms of financial activity possible.

Private markets may now be entering a similar phase. Secondary marketplaces connect buyers and sellers of private-company shares. Periodic tender offers create pathways to liquidity for employees and early investors. Private credit providers and alternative lenders are increasingly developing ways to provide capital against private-company ownership without requiring owners to sell outright. Ownership-management platforms help employees understand and access the value of what they hold.

Viewed individually, these innovations may appear unrelated. Viewed together, they represent the gradual construction of infrastructure around private ownership—addressing the same questions public markets answered decades ago: How should assets be valued? How can ownership be transferred? How can those assets support lending and financial planning?

This is where companies like Techdollar fit into the broader evolution of private markets. Rather than viewing private equity as an asset that only becomes useful after an IPO or acquisition, these platforms explore how ownership can support liquidity and capital access throughout a company’s lifecycle.

In doing so, they are helping build infrastructure around a rapidly growing segment of the economy.

End Game

Public markets did not become liquid because public companies are inherently easier assets to own. They became liquid because decades of infrastructure evolved around them. Exchanges improved price discovery, custodians standardized ownership, and lending products expanded access to capital. Together, these systems transformed public equity from a simple ownership stake into a highly functional financial asset.

Private markets follow a different path. Companies grow larger, and it’s in their best interest to remain private longer, creating unprecedented amounts of value before reaching public liquidity events. Yet the infrastructure surrounding private ownership evolved more slowly. The result is not a failure of private markets, but a sign of their success.

The next chapter of private-market evolution may not be larger valuations or longer periods before IPO. It may be the infrastructure that develops around private ownership itself. If public markets are any indication, the most important innovations may not be the assets. They may be the systems that make those assets underwritable.